Evaluating GIS Professional Graduate Program Curricula in the United States

Professional master's programs have become a primary pathway for workforce‐oriented training in Geographic Information Science and Technology (GIS&T) in the United States, yet systematic, cross‐institutional evidence about what these curricula emphasize and omit remains limited. This study introduces a scalable curriculum evaluation framework that aligns course offerings to the GIS&T Body of Knowledge (BoK) and supports multidimensional interpretation through interactive visual analytics. We compile 532 GIS‐relevant courses from 57 professional master's programs across 44 U.S. universities using publicly available course catalogs and program webpages. Course titles and descriptions are preprocessed and aligned to BoK Topics, Units, and Knowledge Areas using TF‐IDF vectorization, cosine similarity, and hierarchical evidence aggregation with proportional allocation for multidomain courses. The resulting BoK‐aligned course distributions are visualized through heatmap‐based visual analytics to enable three complementary assessments: “local” program‐level diagnosis, “comparative” benchmarking across institutions, and “global” system‐level pattern detection. Results indicate a strong system‐wide emphasis on technical competencies, particularly Data Capture and Analytics and Modeling. At finer granularity, remote sensing and spatial statistics dominate several programs, while Computing Platforms and certain foundational and societal units appear less explicitly represented. The proposed framework offers an adaptable approach for curriculum benchmarking and redesign, supporting evidence‐based decision‐making for program directors, instructors, students, and educational researchers.